INTERVIEW: The margins that will decide McLaren’s intra-team title fight

"There is very, very little between our two drivers, and this is because they are racing at a very, very high level," said Stella.

"We are lucky at McLaren to have two drivers who are deservedly fighting for the World Championship. I think the difference will be made by the accuracy, the precision, the quality of the execution.

"We saw in Silverstone there was a sporting issue for Oscar during the safety car restart, with the consequent penalty costing him the race.

“Related to the circuit characteristic [at Spa], we said it would have always been very difficult for Lando to keep the position, starting first, at the safety car restart. At the same time, Lando didn't help himself by not having a great gap on the finish line. So the execution is what is going to make the main difference.

"We, as a team, will try and make sure that from a reliability point of view, from a team operation point of view, that we are as good as possible, such that it will be the drivers deciding their own outcome in terms of competing for the Drivers' World Championship.”

Piastri currently has the edge on Norris by just nine points, having won six Grands Prix compared to Norris’ five. Whilst you can never discount Max Verstappen, you sense that in trailing by 97 points, his four-year reign as Formula 1 Champion is drawing to a close, and it is going to be a straight shoot-out between the McLaren pair.

The Australian’s advantage is based, not only on his exemplary driving, but also on the basis he has made fewer errors than Norris so far this season, with the biggest being when he ran into the back of Piastri in Canada.

Throughout his career, Norris has developed a renown for making mistakes at crucial times in qualifying sessions and Grands Prix that have cost him grid positions and points. So far this season, Piastri has been cleaner and more composed.

Norris appears to at least have learned to have shut out the noise, not only from outside sources, but primarily in his own head where it has often been the loudest, gnawing away, leading him to at times openly vocalise his frustration.

There is a sense that, as the season has gone on, he is bringing that under control. He is no longer browbeating himself as much as previously, which appeared to be to his detriment, even if he remarked that openly answering questions about the mental side of his game was cathartic.

As Stella mentioned, though, you sense the more composed of the two, the one who can execute more cleanly over a weekend will be the one to become champion. On that basis, you would suggest Piastri has the edge.

Not only is the quality of Stella’s drivers "very high," they are driving at a level of past World Champions he has previously worked with — Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso and Kimi Räikkönen — and as such are deservedly contending for this year's crown.

From Piastri's perspective, you sense he has everything under control; he has allowed very little to irk him, perhaps besides at the British Grand Prix, when he was arguably denied victory by a race control call relating to his braking behind the safety car which incurred a penalty, and annoyed him immensely.

To that extent, for Norris to beat Piastri, you feel he has to find a way to get under his skin. Is he too polite, lacking a ruthless cutting edge possessed by many a previous champion?

Many of the intra-team battles of the past have been fierce, sparked by combatants who refused to give an inch toward one another. Think Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost; Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet; Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg.

In the case of Senna and Prost they were both geniuses of their time, but with a bitter enmity toward one another that spilled over onto the track, similarly with Mansell and Piquet.

As for Hamilton and Rosberg, a former close-knit friendship unravelled at Mercedes as they all too often went wheel-to-wheel. It was Hamilton who initially held sway, winning the first two titles of their partnership before Rosberg finally found the mental edge required to defeat his main rival in 2016, at which point, job done, he immediately retired.

Norris needs to find a spark to ignite a fire underneath his rivalry with Piastri, to rile the 24-year-old into potentially making errors and gain a psychological high ground because right now, the latter has everything under control.

But Stella holds his drivers on a tight leash. Their two contentious moments of last year, in Hungary, and more significantly at Monza, were vigorously dealt with, with the drivers warned such racing was not the McLaren way and a repeat could even harm their future with the team.

With so much at stake, both know they can ill-afford to step out of line.

Perhaps as the season heads towards its denouement, should they remain locked in battle, when the pressure rises and the nerves kick in, one will find the edge over the other.

Assessing the situation, Piastri remarked: "The way you win races at the back end of the season is the same way as at the start. You need to be faster than everyone around you and you need to make the least mistakes possible. That aspect doesn't really change.

"It's also great to be consistent, but if you're consistently being beaten, that's not a recipe for a championship. It's a balancing act of both [speed and consistency].”

"Obviously, if you're a robot, you'd be able to be as fast as possible and make zero mistakes, but we're all humans, so that's not possible. There is going to be an element of minimising mistakes, but you need to be fast at the same time, and you can't afford to sit back. If you try to take that approach, you'll end up being beaten."

For his part, Norris certainly agrees when it comes to mistakes. "It's probably down to who can make the least, I would say, more than anything. It's not necessarily who's outright the quickest, or who can simply race better, or who makes the best overtakes.

"I have my strengths and he has his, and it's more down to the least mistakes, especially because of the position we're in as a team. We have a car which is one of the best made in Formula 1 which are first and second more often than not.

"Therefore it's more between us, who qualifies first and second more often, and who can hold on in Turn 1 and then go from there. There have not been many races where positions have swapped through a race, so it's more about who can make the least mistakes."

As with any intra-team battle, there can only be one winner and one loser. For the winner, being crowned F1's 35^th World Champion, and for the loser, a long, hard winter of what might have been and where it all went wrong.

Images courtesy of Getty Images.